Partial Match
by Lucillia
Summary: An expansion of Cold Cases. A genetic test reveals a dark secret from the First War.


How Harry Potter had ended up at a muggle crime scene wasn't all that long a story. One of the victims of the home invasion turned triple homicide in Crawley had been a squib. While her husband had been distracting the intruders who hadn't let either her or her husband reach the phone, she had flooed the Auror department. Harry, fresh out of training, had been on shift at the time and had been one of the first responders at the scene. The muggle police - one of whom had a muggleborn sibling and was able to recognize Harry from the pictures her brother who'd been a year ahead of Harry had shown her - arrived at the scene a couple minutes later.

Both Harry and the police had arrived far too late to be of assistance to the residents of the home however.

Harry stayed behind to answer every question he could such as exactly who the hell he was, what department he was with, and why the hell he'd been there as the scene was secured and the crime scene techs arrived. Fortunately, Aurors were given badges that were good in the muggle world as well as the magical one, which meant Harry hadn't had to go through the hassle of an interrogation at the station, and rather was able to get away with giving his name, badge number, the number for the Auror department phone desk, a ridiculous excuse for the robes he was wearing, and a plausible reason for why he'd shown up at the crime scene before the police.

After he was done answering questions and giving his report to the best of his ability, he gave a sample of his DNA to the crime scene technician to be used as an elimination sample. He didn't think anything of it until he had gotten a call from the police asking if he could possibly come in and answer some questions. The officer on the line was friendly, and assured him that he wasn't in trouble, but something about the man's tone of voice was...off.

Thinking that he'd be interrogated over the triple homicide he'd arrived too late to stop, since the officer who took his statement had looked doubtful when he'd explained how he'd come to end up at the crime scene, he'd gone down to the station to clear his name.

It turned out that it wasn't his good name that needed clearing, and that there was no way in hell he could clear the names of the ones involved in what he was questioned about, because they were as guilty as sin.

When he'd gotten to the station, Detective Inspector Williams, a tall, balding, brown-haired man who looked to be nearing retirement who had spoken to him over the phone had been there to greet him.

"Thank you for coming Constable Potter." Williams said as he shook his hand. "I wish it had been under better circumstances, but..."

"I'll be glad to answer any questions you may have." Harry said as he followed the Detective Inspector into a conference room. From the looks of it, someone had been using the place as an extra file storage area. The table was completely covered in folders marked "Bloggs", and several of them had been placed on the floor.

"Thank you." Williams said. "I had thought that I might never find answers before I retired."

That threw Harry for a loop. The homicide case was less than two months old, and from the stories he'd heard, the police tended to work homicides for years and sometimes forever before they gave up. Perhaps the man was retiring in the next few weeks rather than a few years from now as he'd assumed? But if that was the case, why did he seem so relieved? Why did he seem almost happy to see him, rather than view him as a suspect? Sure, there was something off about his tone of voice, and the look in his eyes was almost pitying, but...

"Why didn't you think you'd get answers before you retired? What happened in the Broadfield neighborhood was less than two months ago." Harry asked.

The Detective Inspector looked rather confused for a moment before his eyes lit up with recognition.

"Oh, that triple homicide?" Williams said. "That was solved last week. One of the punks that did it went bragging to his girlfriend. I guess I wasn't very clear on the phone when I asked you to come down here."

"Why did you call me down here then?" Harry asked, relieved that he wouldn't have to waste a day off that could have been spent with Ginny answering questions about something he'd thought was over and done with except for the new nightmares.

"I guess I shouldn't beat around the bush since you'll be finding out about it anyways." Williams said. There was that odd hint of pity in the man's voice.

"One of the techs at the lab we sent your genetic sample to ran it through the system by mistake, and it came up as a partial match in forty-seven unsolved homicides which took place between the Summer of 1978 and the Autumn of 1981." Williams continued.

"Excuse me?" Harry said, almost unable to believe his ears. Hermione had told him something about DNA when she was comparing the criminal investigations done by the Auror department with those done by muggle police. He had been able to process only about half of it, but he knew that the words "Partial Match" were significant somehow, and not in a way he wanted to know about when connected to the word "homicide".

"I understand that this would be a bit of a shock to hear, but your genetic profile came up as a partial match in a number of open homicides." Williams said. "From the closeness of the match, it appears that our new suspect is a close male relative of yours, such as a father or an uncle."

"I don't have any uncles." Harry said. That was true in a way, since that tub of lard he sent a Christmas card to every year wasn't related to him by blood.

That almost pitying look was back, and now he knew why. His father had been at up to forty-seven different crime scenes between 1978 and 1981, presumably on Order business, since there was no other reason for him to be there because he had devoted his entire time after graduation to the Order of the Phoenix. Since his father had no reason to be there, he had naturally become a suspect. Though that begged the question of how samples of his father's DNA had gotten close enough to forty-seven bodies that the investigators had found it significant enough to collect.

"I see." Williams said after a moment. "Normally I wouldn't be showing you the files, but Aubrey, that is Sergeant Michaels, thinks that you might be able to identify some of the victims. From what she told me, there had been some sort of a feud between members of your extended family that had gone on under the noses of the police for a couple decades, and that her brother had been caught up in it at some point by accident."

Considering the fact that Pureblood Wizards often didn't have records in the Muggle world, and that the First War had been mainly confined to the Wizarding world, it was possible that he was the only one who could put surnames to faces at the moment since nobody else seemed to know about these crimes for now. He could pass the buck and inform one of his superiors of this, but since he was already down here and Detective Inspector Williams was looking so hopeful...

Steeling himself for the sight of the worst that Death Eaters could dish out, he sat down at the table and pulled the first file towards him.

The man in the first file was barely recognizable, but based on bone structure, he'd be almost willing to swear that he was a Flint. As he read the file, he started feeling slightly ill despite the fact that the man had been a Death Eater. The man had been tortured, and after being tortured, the man had been lit on fire and urinated on. Several hairs and some spit had been collected at the time of the murder. DNA testing that had been done in the late '90s had revealed that there had been two likely culprits, his father, and an unknown male who was possibly related to his father.

The same two suspects had been present at all Thirty-two crime scenes. The unidentified victims at the scenes looked to be from families either associated with Slytherin or with Voldemort's followers. All of the victims died in a manner that was neither slow, painless, or dignified. They'd been hanged, shot, stabbed, drowned, hexed, beaten, and bludgeoned to death.

One significant factor at all of the crime scenes was the fact that they looked like they'd been set up as some sort of prank that would have been funny if it weren't for the corpse. One man had been dressed in Frank N. Furter's clothes from the Rocky Horror Picture Show, another looked as if someone had attempted to copy William Tell's stunt and had gotten it horribly wrong, as the arrow was in the young man's throat rather than the apple stuck to the top of his head.

Harry got sicker and sicker as he read each account, growing more and more certain that his father was responsible for the homicides and that Sirius had been his accomplice or vice versa.

He could understand war. He could understand killing Death Eaters. At that point, Death Eaters were enemy combatants. What he could not understand was why his father and his godfather had gone after those who weren't marked. Only about a third of the people in these cases had been marked. Others...others...

He had run to the bathroom and gotten sick after he'd seen what his father and his godfather had done to a thirteen year old boy whose only crime had apparently been being born to the wrong people.

These hadn't been deaths on the battlefield. His father and his godfather had deliberately caught them, tortured them, and killed them. They had apparently thought it had been a big fucking joke while they did so.

He now had a better understanding as to why his godfather had been confined to headquarters, and it hadn't been just because Dumbledore was being a manipulative bastard. The war had been low key and out of sight, limited to minor initial skirmishes at that point. Had Black gotten out and killed the wrong person, it could have been kicked up several notches at a time when the Order had neither the manpower nor the necessary support to deal with such an escalation.

Dumbledore couldn't have not known about this. This had also probably been why Dumbledore hadn't pushed too hard for a trial in 1981, after all, if Sirius Black was capable of torturing and murdering a thirteen year old child, who else knew what he was capable of.

As he did his best to help Detective Inspector Williams close a number of cases that had hung over his life like a dark cloud, poisoning everything it touched, Harry couldn't help but see something of a resemblance between his father and Voldemort. Sure, they'd been on opposite sides of the war, and Voldemort was an inhuman monster who had killed thousands, but...but, he couldn't help but see another handsome and charming Head Boy who had used his wit and good looks to literally get away with murder.

Despite what everyone had told him, his father had never been a good man.


End file.
